The Tumbled
Date
2020
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Haverford College. Department of English
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Thesis
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The Terry M. Krieger '69 Memorial Prize
Language
eng
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Open Access
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Abstract
"The Tumbled" is a story about a white family's failures: first, to grieve the loss of a loved one, and second, to understand their own history. The Pleutises are stuck in some sort of hell, or purgatory, or time loop, depending on how you read the story. In any case, they are stuck in a world in which whiteness does not work. This is meant doubly—in one sense, whiteness does not work because the Pleutises no longer benefit from the freedom of movement and exercise of control that characterize white existence; in another, whiteness does not work because it blocks them from meeting the needs that emerge in their damned state of grief. Whiteness does not work because it has no way to accommodate loss. Still, by inviting Savor to perform at their staged memorial service for Robert, the Pleutises use all that is left of their power to try to escape. They enact a kind of voyeuristic haunting, at once demanding much of Savor and unsettling him greatly. Finally, the destabilizing function of time in the story – the reenactment of Frederick Douglass's 1852 speech, the implications of colonial ancestry, the fact that the Pleutises have no way of knowing how long they have been stuck– calls into question conventional understandings of present and past. The past haunts the present, the present haunts the past, and these hauntings overlap in a messy historical arena of life, death, and damnation.